Philosophy - East and West

Words to shape our attitudes

Philosophy is something that we all invent and use to explain our lives and to justify our actions. It is putting together words to help us make sense of our lives and with those words, to explain and justify our existence thereby shaping our future.

Western philosophy is about outward looking based on the idea that the world we see around us is real and tangible. Eastern philosophy on the other hand is inward looking and based on the knowledge that the world around us is in fact an illusion.

Western philosophy has a history and traditions going back for several thousand years. Many students of philosophy will start with reading Plato who in my opinion is as much an entertainer as a logician, and no one is really sure whether Socrates actually existed as a person or whether he was a character that Plato invented for his narrative.

It is through Western philosophy that the importance of the individual became established along with ideas like ‘might is right’ justifying the rights of the strong to rule over the weak. This rule of the strong was for those who had the strong arguments, the better physique or the more powerful weapon and this is how the human world operates today.

Western philosophy shapes beliefs and power over lifeEastern philosophy enhances knowledge and cooperation with life

If we look at our world, it is ruled by the principles of Western philosophy where everything is about the individual, and the collective only has an social/economic value. Due to our sense of individualism and because we are in appearance stronger than nature, we believe that we actually have the right to manipulate or control nature and to take what we believe that we deserve without necessarily putting anything back.

Philosophy is an arrangement of words to explain and justify one’s beliefs, rights and actions in life.

So Western philosophy arranges words to justify domination and an elevated sense of self in an external sense. We have learned through psychology that the domineering person is often a weakling on the inside and they use their power and skills at manipulation to dominate other people to make themselves feel better about themselves.

It is from this foundation that the West looks at the world and tries to control it, and yet while the leadership seems all powerful, that is really an illusion because within themselves they do not know life or the nature of their existence. Western philosophy is all about understanding the stuff of life, the material world in order to profit from it and to acquire power. This is not always clear cut because Western philosophy excepts that lying is an acceptable way of acquiring and holding onto power.

Yet if we step back from this and look at the world in its entirety, we can see that Western philosophy and Western ideology is driving the world rapidly towards a doomsday and an end to all life on earth.

Eastern philosophy begins with the realisation that we don’t know. Because the world is round, even though we may stand a few metres apart and look up, what we both call up is a divergent line and therefore a different direction. If we think about the universe around us, no one has any real knowledge of which way is actually up. Up down, left and right are simply arbitrary terms of reference.

So in Eastern philosophy there are no beliefs, only points of knowledge the first of which is that we are here, but we know virtually nothing else and over the millennia this has generated an attitude of questioning or seeking. The primary question is who am I and why am I here? It makes no difference whether we use the reference of I or we it’s still the same question.

In studying life the eastern philosophers and mystics came to recognise that there are only two directions in life one is out, and the other is in. From exploring these two directions, people learned that what is inside is a reflection of what is outside and vice-versa. In other words the world inside of us is a reflection of the world outside of us.

The thrust of Eastern philosophy instead of seeking to control the world and justify individual existence evolved in such a way that their words attempted to draw the parallels between the internal and external reality of life, and the goal of life was to realise the nature of existence which coincidentally also resolved all doubts and fears.

So while Western philosophy looked outwards and arrange the world to hold fear and suffering at bay through the control of physical reality, easterners were seeking to become one with life and it is through that harmony that they discovered that their fears were eliminated and they had no need to control the external world.

The consequences

Western thought has dominated life on earth for the past 2000 years, but it is only in the last 500 years that the West has acquired so much power that it is able to destroy the planet we depend on the life on an industrial scale. So unless something drastic happens to avert this course, all life on earth will be destroyed. There is no question of this not happening unless we as a collective do something about it.

The hope

Eastern thought has been about harmonising with life and realising the nature of existence. This is something instinctive within all of us because of heart, we all want to know. So what is heartening is that Eastern thought is flourishing across the entire world. There is hardly a town or city where you won’t find a yoga class and in many cities Hindu communities are merging within Western populations.

What is called as Hinduism is an embodiment of Eastern philosophy for the collective harmonisation and coexistence with life. This creates a societal platform that enables a great many people to practice what may be called spiritual exercises such as meditation through which they can come to know the nature of existence.

In analysis, a world governed by Western philosophy is doomed to destruction and the only possibility we have for our continued existence is a right to dominance of Eastern philosophy as represented by Hinduism.

Many people see Hinduism as being polytheistic, but it is through Hinduism and the practice of yoga, or more specifically meditation that we humans although we see ourselves as being organic, we are in fact also a technology.

Yoga is a science of understanding the technology and Hinduism is the social application for human well-being. Within this sense of philosophy, Buddhism is also valid, but belief systems are fundamentally antagonistic to life and dangerous.

You can become what you believe, but believing is a very dangerous game because it has no natural foundation and is unprovable by any scientific or yogic method.

Or you can suspend your beliefs in disbelief’s, understand that you don’t know and that understanding of not knowing then becomes a foundation to seek out is real is not real.

We must remember that during the time when Europeans were beginning to learn agriculture and beginning to live in towns, there were large well organised cities and global trade. The Western philosophy that had its roots in Europe then grew to take over the world. In its efforts to understand the nature of existence, Western science has finally arrived at the same understanding through technological processes that the eastern mystics have known for tens of thousands of years.

That realisation, that knowledge that is known by a great many extraordinarily ordinary people came a great cost. But that knowledge is that what we call as reality has no inherent existence. Or as Sadhguru says, “this life is a dream, but the dream is real.”

If your life is attached to the doomsday clock, it’s time to change or your family line will go extinct everything you’ve ever worked for rendered as a waste of time and effort.